Top 70 Max Hastings Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you can’t get a job as a pianist in a brothel you become a royal reporter.”

— Max Hastings

2. “Until 1943, when Stalingrad and bombing began to change everything, most German civilians save those who lost loved ones found the conflict a numbing presence rather than a trauma.”

— Max Hastings

3. “We’re taking part in a divine comedy and we should realise that the play is always a comedy, in that we’re all ultimately ridiculous.”

— Max Hastings

4. “As George Orwell wisely observed a generation later, the only way swiftly to end a war is to lose it.”

— Max Hastings

5. “What the Red Army did in Germany was the darkest stain on its record in the war.”

— Max Hastings

6. “A Russian, the poet David Samoilov, said later, “We were all expecting war. But we were not expecting that war.”

— Max Hastings

7. “The egregious error committed by US statesmen and commanders was not that of lying to the world, but rather that of lying to themselves.”

— Max Hastings

8. “It’s miraculous how much easier the computer has made my sort of work.”

— Max Hastings

9. “Polish women and children were used as human shields for the advance of German troops.”

— Max Hastings

10. “The Russians eventually killed more than 4.5 million German soldiers, while American and British ground and air forces accounted for only about 500,000.”

— Max Hastings

11. “It seems a fair test of any political movement to enquire not whether it is capitalist, communist or fascist, but whether it is fundamentally humane.”

— Max Hastings

12. “In the course of the war, some 70,000 French people were killed by Allied bombs: “collateral damage” in France thus included almost one-third more civilians accidentally killed than the British suffered from the Luftwaffe’s deliberate assault on their island. Bombing played a critical role in slowing the German buildup after D-Day, but the price was high.”

— Max Hastings

13. “Soviet conduct could be deemed less barbaric than that of the Nazis only because it embraced no single enormity to match the Holocaust.”

— Max Hastings

14. “The only redemptive feature of war is the brotherhood which it forges.”

— Max Hastings

15. “Optimism is the elixir of life for the weak.”

— Max Hastings

16. “One of Beria’s most cynical ruses was carried out in August 1941: NKVD agents disguised as Nazi parachutists were dropped into the Volga German autonomous region, to test the loyalty of its citizens. Villages where the new arrivals were offered shelter were liquidated wholesale; the entire region’s surviving population was eventually deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan.”

— Max Hastings

17. “People who get on at school are the ones who play by the rules, and no one’s going to get far in later life playing by the system.”

— Max Hastings

18. “If Franco had joined the war, the inevitable fall of Gibraltar would have doomed Malta. It would have been much harder – perhaps impossible – for the British to hold the Middle East.”

— Max Hastings

19. “At Arnhem, the British fielded too many gentlemen and not enough players.”

— Max Hastings

20. “American dismay in the face of those early defeats was assuaged by skilful propaganda. The United States had much less to lose in the East than did the British Empire.”

— Max Hastings

21. “Diem regarded the Americans as ‘great big children – well-intentioned, powerful, with a lot of technical know-how, but not very sophisticated in dealing with him or his race’.”

— Max Hastings

22. “Lots of us when we’re children believe ‘oh well, if the world knew us as we really are, they’d know what wonderful, clever, brilliant, charming people we really are.’”

— Max Hastings

23. “France’s Gen. Alphonse Juin was the only Allied commander to emerge from the mountain campaigns with an enhanced reputation: a marshal who had voluntarily dropped a rank to fight in Italy, Juin was far better fitted to direct operations than either Alexander or Clark.”

— Max Hastings

24. “Machiavelli observed that ‘wars begin when you will, but do not end when you please’.”

— Max Hastings

25. “After the armistice, Finland, having failed to gain useful help from Britain and France, turned to Germany for assistance in rearming its forces, which Hitler was happy to provide.”

— Max Hastings

26. “I’ve always found women more loyal, more disciplined, less neurotic, more hardworking. I just think they’re perfect colleagues. Whereas, God knows, I’ve dealt with plenty of neurotic men.”

— Max Hastings

27. “After more than five years of strife in the name of freedom, tens of millions of people were merely to exchange one tyranny for another. Some.”

— Max Hastings

28. “When I am fishing, I think quite a lot about the fish, but I also think about the book I’m writing.”

— Max Hastings

29. “Soldiers may accept a need to be the first to die in a war, but there is often an unseemly scramble to avoid becoming the last.”

— Max Hastings

30. “Pearl Harbor, together with racism soon fuelled by tidings of Japanese savagery, ensured that Americans found it easy to hate their Asian enemy. But from beginning to end, few felt anything like the animosity towards the Germans that came readily to Europeans; it proved hard even to rouse American anger about Hitler’s reported persecution of the Jews.”

— Max Hastings

31. “To this day, mass graves of Stalin’s victims continue to be uncovered in eastern Poland. As.”

— Max Hastings

32. “The main thing those Americans who really knew about Vietnam knew was how little they knew.”

— Max Hastings

33. “Never in history have lies been such vital instruments of diplomacy and policy.”

— Max Hastings

34. “Amoz Oz, who said something of the same kind, but from a different perspective: ‘People like you’, he said to me, ’are going to become very disappointed in Israel in the years ahead. You want it to behave like a European society. Instead, it is becoming a Middle Eastern society. I hope that it will not behave worse than other Middle Eastern societies. But you should not delude yourself that it is likely to behave much better.”

— Max Hastings

35. “The campaign’s most important consequence was that it precipitated the fall of Chamberlain. Had there been no Norway, it is overwhelmingly likely that he would have retained office as prime minister through the campaign in France that followed.”

— Max Hastings

36. “The record suggests that official secrecy does more to protect intelligence agencies from domestic accountability for their own follies than to shield them from enemy penetration.”

— Max Hastings

37. “Stalin’s policies had driven millions more to starvation and even cannibalism.”

— Max Hastings

38. “The French were more tolerant of brothels than any other nation in Europe, though there was some dispute about whether this reflected enlightenment or depravity.”

— Max Hastings

39. “Looking back later, we could see that the military code was unreasonable. But at that time, we regarded dying for our country as our duty. If men had been allowed to surrender honourably, everybody would have been doing it.”

— Max Hastings

40. “All men who participate in wars find themselves obliged to do things which, if they are decent people, they afterwards regret.”

— Max Hastings

41. “Above all, war was a reminder of the savagery of life.”

— Max Hastings

42. “In all armies, soldiers serving with forward combat units shared a contempt for the much larger number of men in the rear areas who fulfilled roles in which they faced negligible risk: the infantry bore 90 percent of global army casualties.”

— Max Hastings

43. “I would have been a disastrous soldier.”

— Max Hastings

44. “All his life, the ruler of Russia displayed towards able comrades a blend of admiration and envy which impelled him to murder most of them sooner or later.”

— Max Hastings

45. “Allied powers provided for their own peoples levels of nourishment which they denied to others, including societies notionally under their protection.”

— Max Hastings

46. “Here was a manifestation of a huge, historic British folly, repeated over many centuries including the twenty-first: the adoption of gesture strategy, committing small forces as an earnest of good intentions, heedless of their gross inadequacy for the military purpose at hand.”

— Max Hastings

47. “The domestic lesson of the 1950–53 war that wrecked Harry Truman’s presidency was that, though Americans were willing to pay other people to die combating ‘Reds’ in faraway Asian countries, they resisted seeing their own boys sacrificed.”

— Max Hastings

48. “It did not occur to Hitler, after his victories in the west, that it might be more difficult to overcome a brutalised society, inured to suffering, than democracies such as France and Britain, in which moderation and respect for human life were deemed virtues.”

— Max Hastings

49. “I’m a wet liberal really, and always have been. But I’m sort of an aggressive wet liberal.”

— Max Hastings

50. “Sometimes I get caught up in a kind of puzzled wonder at things, and think of all the work and effort and unlimited money that is used today to destroy, and not so long ago there was no money or work, and it seems so wrong somehow, that money and effort could always be found to pull down and destroy rather than build up.”

— Max Hastings